Multiple Indian payloads launched by Space X’s Falcon 9

Multiple payloads developed by Indian companies were successfully deployed in orbit by Space X’s Falcon 9 in the early hours of October 2 from the Space Launch Complex 4E (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, U.S.A., as part of the Transporter-18 rideshare mission.

Dhruva Space’s Launching Expeditions for Aspiring Payloads (LEAP-2), hosting multiple In-Orbit Demonstration (IOD) missions, which includes a star tracker by France-based Sodern ArianeGroup, and TAPAS-1 by India-based Satleo Labs, were part of the Transporter-18 mission.

Dhruva Space stated that LEAP-2 was successfully deployed in orbit at 1 a.m. IST on October 2. It has undertaken the end-to-end launch integration of the LEAP-2 satellite with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle, building on its experience with LEAP-1, where Dhruva Space became the first private Indian company to undertake the launch vehicle integration of its satellite in-house.

“This extends Dhruva Space’s role beyond satellite manufacturing into launch integration and end-to-end mission delivery, reinforcing its full-stack space engineering approach. LEAP-2 will be supported by Dhruva Space’s growing global ground infrastructure, including its owned and operated ground station in Luleå, Sweden; the first NGE-owned and operated ground station outside India, authorised by the Government of India to provide Ground-Station-as-a-Service,” the company stated.

TAPAS-1 (Thermal Access Platform for Analytics & Solutions), developed by SatLeo Labs, is India’s first dedicated commercial CubeSat-category thermal payload, and the opening flight of the country’s first full-stack commercial thermal intelligence platform.

The Ahmedabad0based SatLeo Labs said that using Thermal Infrared (TIR) sensing, TAPAS-1 captures temperature information invisible to conventional optical imagery, enabling in-orbit demonstration and validation of SatLeo’s thermal sensing technology, payload performance, and data-processing capabilities. The mission marks a category-first for India in dedicated commercial thermal (LWIR) Earth observation.

Also part of the mission was TakeMe2Space, which launched its MOI-1A satellite that enables customers to run AI models on Earth-observation data directly in orbit, processing imagery before transmitting the resulting insights to the ground.

“The 14 kg satellite carried 117 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of onboard computing capacity, 2 TB of storage, and a nine-band multispectral imager. These capabilities are designed to reduce the need to download large volumes of raw imagery for processing on Earth, supporting applications such as agricultural monitoring, mining and supply-chain intelligence,” according to TakeMe2Space.

Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (INSPACe) Chairperson Pawan Kumar Goenka said that the deployment of the payloads as part of SpaceX’s Transporter-18 mission is a big day for India’s private space sector.

“Genuinely big day for India’s private space sector. SpaceX’s Transporter 18 is carrying two Indian satellites and an Indian hosted payload into orbit, all authorised by IN-SPACe. Among them, @satleolabs TAPAS-1, India’s first commercial thermal imaging payload built by a private company. Thermal sensing picks up what ordinary optical cameras cannot, from crop stress to forest fires to urban heat. A new layer of Earth intelligence, now opened up by Indian industry. Alongside it, @tm2space‘s MOI-1A brings AI computing to orbit, running models on the satellite itself, and @DhruvaSpace ‘s LEAP-2 flies four payloads, demonstrating its platform for hosting others in space. Orbital computing, thermal intelligence, and a homegrown hosting platform, all on a single flight. This is the range and ambition of India’s private space ecosystem today. Congratulations to all three teams. Wishing you a clean deployment and a long innings in orbit,” Goenka posted on X.

In total, the 18th Transporter rideshare mission carried 130 payloads.